Until now, comments have been wide open, with no restrictions. You don’t have to register with the blog or enter an e-mail address, and comments appear instantly. But, alas, after two months online, the spammers have found us.
For the past week I’ve been fighting spam entries in the comments. I have an exclusion list of suspicious words, but it isn’t enough of a deterrent. Every day I delete twice as many as the previous day, and the trend is on an upwards curve.
So from now on, every comment will be held until I approve it. Sorry! You don’t have to do anything more than wait for your comment to appear, but it won’t show up automatically. If you don’t like that approach, I’ll offer another alternative, such as site registration.
My apologies for the inconvenience.
Everybody sing! “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM!! That was a Python bit, wasn’t it?
Two more pieces of spam slipped through. Better than it was, but keeping my eye on it.
I hadn’t read it, but I did now! The expanded list of anti-spam keywords I got from WordPress seems to be working. For now.
“apparently it’s so cheap to blanket the world with this junk they have no reason not to do it.”
Think you nailed it there. And speaking of spam, did you read this article.
But if you want the hit count, in October there were over 50,000 hits, excluding my own.
The hit count, as such, doesn’t really tell the story. So far this month there have been 765 different visitors, with 119 of them checking yesterday. That doesn’t include any hits from search engines.
Doug, do you have any idea how many “hits” you get a day? I’m surprised you didn’t have the security feature in from the beginning. ESPECIALLY WITH ME, YOUR TWIN SISTER, WHO “TELLS ALL, AND OMITS NOTHING!” 😉
After changing the policy I updated the keyword list, and this morning yours was the only message awaiting moderation. So I’ve disabled the moderation feature.
What I don’t understand is what possible return there is for the spammers to realize? But apparently it’s so cheap to blanket the world with this junk they have no reason not to do it.
I had a similar problem at hailthetiki… Had to enable Blogger’s keyword verification (user types one of those styilzed randonm words that gets displayed, much like when going through Ticketmaster, before they could post)… that seemed to stop the spambots. Good luck!